Paul S wrote:

Too bad it has no "grunt", whatsoever.

Romy the Cat wrote:

Last night I was listening  Zubin Mehta’s recording of Bruckner’s Symphony No.9. It was his first recoding from 1966 with Vienna. I am not a big fun of this performance all together but it has spectacular first movement. It played superbly slow and superbly soft. Wiener Philharmoniker showed off so fantastics colors that it almost like looking into a sonic kaleidoscope. I played this movement a lot and I feel my record surface is not good anymore but still the first movement sound good. The way how London recorded the play is a bit bass shy and the orchestra does not have that Bruckner’s crash, still not a lot of people have balls to play Bruckner’s 9 so gloriously lush… So, why I was listening my playback it mentally noted some predictably of its Sound. It is not that I did not see it before but lately it becomes a bit more forward presentable. What happened lately was elimination a reference to ground and running my playback in the way how I use to run it in my old room – with floating ground after the PP2000. This did add some upper MF clarity and made my MF a bit too much.   Too much of what?  This is a complicated question.  Surely it is not about amplitude – running DSET I can moderate MF as much as I want. It is not about color. The YO186 has wonderful colors and it might not be such a thing and too many colors if tube is chromatically neutral. What YO186 has is a very special and in a way unique throaty character that makes most of the recording to sound better than they are. It might be called a very minor touch of hoarseness or even roughness but very delicate and very sophisticated. Still, with some recording this characteristic become a bit more recognizable then I would like it be. I think this characteristic might be moderated by driving the tube harder.  It is 12W tube and I drive it at near 8W. However, in my MF- DSET direct-coupled application and with 410V max I have no ways to drive the plate at 10-12W. So, for now I pulled my YO186 out and put in type 45 tube.  I think they sound better than any other expensive 2.5V and 4V tubes I have. To change tube in MF Milq is very simple and thanks God I did two tube socket with 2.5V for 2A3/45 and alike and 4V for PX4/RE604 and alike.  I will play the type 45 for a while, while I test the YO186 – perhaps it just died… I like the type 45 as it is super clean. I kind of miss the YO186’s very fine feeling of texture but I might find some ways to get it. It is for sure another flavor of sound and strings become less “complex” but less “problematic” at the same time. The type 45 has for sure less or no own colorations of any kind I will let it play for a while and let see where it will lend me.

I have in music many reference points that I call “Transcendent Moments”. They are not the moment of beauty but rather combinations of beauty and misery of such caliber that you wonder how humans were able to create it – God must be at his day off when they did it. For years, besides chasing Sounds and writing about it at this stupid forum I have another reference in my playback – how high magnitude of my reference “Transcendent Moments” my playback can throw.  The better playback I have the more magic, mysterious, mystifying and the more fantasy stimulating my “Transcendent Moments” are. So, the type 45 tube at my MF, although it doe wonderfully sound it at the same time it also greatly reduces the bewildering effect of my Transcendent Moments. The YO186 was uncontested kink from that perspective.

For instance the very opening phrase in Adagio from Dvorak 8th Symphony is one of my Transcendent Moments. The same phrase use by Tchaikovsky in his 1812 overture, eight years before Dvorak but Tchaikovsky went to nowhere with it. Dvorak did with it something magnificent, bringing the phrase to the realm of unresolved childhood fantasy. Being properly played this, a few second-long fragment, is absolutely sufficient to me to tell about playback more than I need to know. The type 45 tube just convert my entering to Adagio into nothing special, absolutely diluting all “unexplained” magic from the music. Bad, bad, bad tube…. :-(

Romy, can you tell at this point if the driver, operating points, or the particular 45s are "at fault" here, and/or all are in sync?  The only "magic" I noticed from the few 45s I have heard (but not seriously played with...) was the uncanny sense of "real" sound across its useable range.  I have to say, I actually "like" what I perceive as the "neutral" character of that tube.  Few seem to get what I hear as an amazing ability to get out of its own way; but I have long thought the tube has been widely mis-used; and certainly so in my own case.

Also, there are 45s and 45s.  I understand that some of the new ones were "redesigned" to push and be pushed harder than the "sought-after" NOS.  I think there are already several posts about it on this site.

Not selling the 45; just curious.

Best Regards,
Paul

I put the YO186 back to the use. The sound was fine but it had that a fine over glow of spoiled fall colors that I described before. It was not disgusting, in fact pleasurable but a bit too much.

Then I asked to myself what happen and why this effect shown only last week. A week ago I freed up the playback ground, letting it to float, and felt that it cleaned up my MF very nicely. So, why along with clearing up of MF I got deviation from chromatic neutrality. I was thinking, thinking, thinking and then it come to me that this a bit overly-sugary touch of Sound very reminds me the situation what my Injection Channel provide too much output.

Now, I do not play games with Injection Channel riding up and down – it set at very precise level, giving very accurate amount of specific colors to Macondo. Why the striping ground noise from MF would impact it? It shall be affected. Still, it is very easy to try and I dropped 2dB on the Reds’ outputs.  The sound instantly got fixed and not just fixed but become supper good. It has the new MF clarity but at the same time it has right, non-exaggerated chromatic density. Very, very nice.

Of cause next I grounded my playback with one single path. The colors got dropped immediately and I was forced to add more output from my Injection Channel to compensate it.

This is very interesting. For sure the ground of my amps does not affect output of my amps. However, it looks like with cleaner MF my YO186/S2 tandem has different tolerance or need for injections of colors. Still, my MF with floated ground is still benefited from my Injection by it looks like at 2-3dB less. I did a few adjustments of proper level of Injection with and without ground and the effect was very repeatable and predicable.

Very good. It looks like I have cranked this problem, even though I still have no explanation for it.

Romy the Cat wrote:

floobydust wrote:

Been a long time since I've been on the fora... too much real work, too much travel. Still, nice to see this particular thread resurrected. I'm interested to see if you have revisited the 45 since more than a year ago. I still run my 45 amps regularly when home... and they still deliver sonically. But would be interesting to know if you have done any additional listening and/or comparisons against the YO186.

Romy the Cat wrote:

That sucks. I use to have a box of perhaps a dozen of YO186 but I did not see it for a while, pretty much from the time I moved to new house. I was listening today some of my “critical” reference stuff and concluded with very high certainty that my MF is gone, it just does not have the tonal yield that it use to have. Well, the way how Milq is built is very simple to put in there any 45/2A3 or any 4V European tube, so I did today for a couple hours. To my disappointment I did not get the Sound that I was getting before. Other tubes give me very clean and very effective sound but none of them can do brass that my old YO186 was able to do.  I am looking for very specific portraying of brass micro- bubbling, of that super-granular, abrasive, coarse tonal texture, when overtones clash like waves during Nor'easter storm and harmonics have legs growing right from neck down. My other best tubes, including my best Nazi tubes, just do not got for that brass complexity and their brass sound more like string’s rosin bite. With YO186, when it was alive, brass was felid with zillion explosive micro-bubbles that make it immensely pleasurable and super fascinating to listen. When NDR Symphony unleash own brass in Bruckner it is no tomorrow in my playback without my YO186. I want my brass back, I want my YO186 back. I only hope that Amy did not learn how all those tubes cost and did not pound them in order to raise money to by her new cosmetics…. The caT

N-set wrote:

Somewhere earlier last year I searched for some tubes in ex-USSR and YO186 did pop up, esp. in Ucraine IIRC, with not unbearable price ~$100/tube, although in unknown condition (I did not buy any).

Romy the Cat wrote:

Romy the Cat wrote: That sucks. I use to have a box of perhaps a dozen of YO186 but I did not see it for a while, pretty much from the time I moved to new house. I was listening today some of my “critical” reference stuff and concluded with very high certainty that my MF is gone, it just does not have the tonal yield that it use to have. Well, the way how Milq is built is very simple to put in there any 45/2A3 or any 4V European tube, so I did today for a couple hours. To my disappointment I did not get the Sound that I was getting before. Other tubes give me very clean and very effective sound but none of them can do brass that my old YO186 was able to do.  I am looking for very specific portraying of brass micro- bubbling, of that super-granular, abrasive, coarse tonal texture, when overtones clash like waves during Nor'easter storm and harmonics have legs growing right from neck down. My other best tubes, including my best Nazi tubes, just do not got for that brass complexity and their brass sound more like string’s rosin bite. With YO186, when it was alive, brass was felid with zillion explosive micro-bubbles that make it immensely pleasurable and super fascinating to listen. When NDR Symphony unleash own brass in Bruckner it is no tomorrow in my playback without my YO186. I want my brass back, I want my YO186 back. I only hope that Amy did not learn how all those tubes cost and did not pound them in order to raise money to by her new cosmetics…. The caT This nigh I made a very interesting discovery. It turned out that my YO186 tube did not dive. The sound from the midrange was too soft and not distinctive. I was experimenting with different tubes to substitute YO186 and while I did it I was following my Macondo calibration sheet. Thanks god I did it long time back and locked all outputs: http://www.goodsoundclub.com/Site_Images/MacondoCalibration.jpg   So, paling with all of it I realized that the acoustic output of my YO186 was dropped from reference 81dB to 78dB and 79dB. I have the “smart” attenuator in the secondary and I added volume to MF and hallelujah- the playback once again sounds just wonderfully! However, this made me to think: how the hell my MF was able to lose around 3dB? The first blame would be for the demagnetization of drivers. I very much doubt that it might be the case. Drivers demagnetize with temperature, excessive power or DC. Neither is in presence. The drivers see high pass of 3kHz and around 400mV there is absolutely no power to demagnetize them.  Then I begin to blame the amp.   Well, the amp is not truly blamable. If the tube did get worn then the tube gain shall not change. The tube gain is the geometry of electrodes; the tube with lost cathode emission shall not loose gain. Something might get overheated in the amp with time and the amp might lose gain. I was looking and looking and thinking and thinking about the amp circuitry and I do not see anything that might be responsible for it. http://www.goodsoundclub.com/Site_Images/Melquiades_YO-186_Attenuation_revision.jpg I was even thinking that the cleaning lady accidently did it but she prohibited to clean amps and thank God she does obey it. I still would like to know the answer how I lost my 3dB in both channels. I think it did happen during the last 2-3 months and that was when I begin to notice that my playback is slightly tonally softer and less articulate then what it used to be.   Rgs, the Cat